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A senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander was assassinated today as he left Damascus and headed towards Beirut, Lebanon. Was Israeli responsible for taking out the Iranian commander who was working closely with Hezbollah? Or was this payback by a Syrian rebel group that opposes Iranian help for the Assad regime in Damascus? Or is there another explanation all together? So far it is a mystery, yet it comes on the heels of the Israeli airstrike on a Syrian convoy taking weapons to Lebanon so many analysts are thinking this was another move by Netanyahu’s government to damage key links in the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah axis.

“General Hassan Shateri was killed on Tuesday in an ambush on the way from Damascus towards the Lebanese capital, the Iranian authorities said,” reports the London Telegraph. “They blamed the attack on Israel. Gen Shateri was also in charge of the Iranian of the Iranian Committee for the Reconstruction of Lebanon, set up after the devastating war in 2006 between Israel and the Iran supported Shiite Hezbollah militia. He died ‘at the hands of Zionist regime mercenaries and backers,’ the force’s spokesman, Ramezan Sherif, said in the statement.”

The Telegraph also reported that “sources inside the Hezbollah militia told the Daily Telegraph they had known that Mr Shateri was targeted for assassination for a long time, and that arrests had been made of men suspected of planning an attack. Israel has been accused using its secret service or proxy agents to murder Iranian targets before. Four Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated in the past two years in what Iran, and many other countries have said are Israeli maneouvres in a proxy war. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Gen Shateri was shot dead by rebels. ‘We do not know exactly where he was shot, but we do know that a rebel group ambushed his vehicle while en route from Damascus to Beirut,’ the Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.”